1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data processing systems and, in particular, to machine translation. Still more particularly, the present invention provides a method, apparatus, and program for chaining machine translation engines to control error propagation.
2. Background of the Invention
Machine translation (MT) is a computer technology wherein a computer software program or computer hardware translates a textual source human language into some textual target human language. An example is translation from English to German. Machine translation services are provided for many pairs of languages. Typically, a language pair supplier may develop language pair engines that can provide translation for common language pairs. However, to provide a machine translation for every possible combination of source language and target language would require an extremely large amount of time and code. Thus, it is unrealistic to provide a language pair for every possible combination, especially considering that demand for most pairs may be very low or nonexistent.
Machine translation may be provided for some pairs by chaining pairs together. For example, translation from German to French may be provided by chaining a German-to-English translation with an English-to-French translation. However, each translation engine may have a degree of inaccuracy or error. By increasing the number of translation engines in a translation, the likelihood of inaccuracy or error is also increased.
Therefore, it would be advantageous to provide an improved mechanism for chaining machine translation engines to control error propagation.